Mathsoft Announces S-PLUS 2000 for Windows; New Version Offers Links to Bloomberg, FAME and LIM Financial Databases

MathSoft, Inc., provider of the broadest line of technical calculation and analytical software for business and academia, has introduced S-PLUS 2000 for Windows.

The premier tool for data analysis, data mining, and statistical modeling, S-PLUS 2000 delivers powerful new visualization and analysis capabilities for a wide variety of applications and especially for finance, life sciences and manufacturing.

In addition to the financial data links, S-PLUS 2000 offers new and updated statistical techniques, powerful interactive visualization features, more data manipulation capabilities, and all new project management tools. The new release also delivers numerous ease-of-use enhancements and an updated Microsoft Office look and feel.

"As data warehousing adoption increases, the market for tools that help users leverage very large data sets is increasing. To be effective in reaching this business analysis market, effective data visualization software must offer ease-of-use as well as sophisticated graphics and analytical capabilities," says Jacqueline Sweeney of International Data Corporation. "MathSoft's S-PLUS 2000 can be utilized across a variety of industries and provides the user an unintimidating interface with powerful tools for manipulating and visualizing large amounts of data."

"S-PLUS 2000 is a major upgrade for our customers and illustrates MathSoft's commitment to delivering easy-to-use data analysis, visualization and modeling tools to data analysts in a variety of industries," says Rick Bohdanowicz, senior vice president and general manager of MathSoft's Data Analysis Products Division. "We're excited to offer new financial database links that are the culmination of our partnership efforts with the leading technology providers in the finance industry."

"The new project management tools in S-PLUS 2000 allow me to work more efficiently and are much better than the tools in other data analysis software I've used," says Steven Novick, statistician at Becton Dickinson, "S-PLUS's ability to save my data, graphs and scripts as a collective project is very convenient and a real time-saver."

Key new benefits of S-PLUS 2000 include:

• Powerful links to financial data vendors -- S-PLUS 2000 includes direct links to Bloomberg, FAME, and LIM financial databases. Through these technology links, financial users can tap into historical time-series data directly from S-PLUS.
• New and enhanced cutting-edge statistical techniques -- The new release incorporates the latest research in linear and nonlinear mixed-effects models offering over 500 functions for fitting linear and nonlinear regression models to correlated data. S-PLUS 2000 also offers the newest techniques in survival analysis including features not found in any other major package, such as smoothing splines and random effect (frailty) models.
• New interactive visualization capabilities -- S-PLUS 2000 offers five new plot types including high-low-open-close and candlestick charts, multiple x-y pair plots, and nonlinear curve fitting plots. New pop-up descriptions of data values help users identify data points on graphs.
• Improved ease of use -- New and updated dialogs for statistical analysis, including enhanced discriminant analysis functions and dialogs, simplify the process of analyzing data. Full-featured quality control charting is now available from convenient menus and dialogs. Collections of data and graph files can be saved together for more efficient project management.
• Powerful new data manipulation capabilities -- S-PLUS 2000 features new capabilities for handling data including sophisticated block, row, and column operations plus new Data Fill, Create Categories, Expand Grid and Subset Builder dialogs. Pop-up descriptions of data columns allow users to include explanations along with the data.
• Enhanced interoperability through automation -- S-PLUS 2000 includes state-of-the-art Automation client and server capabilities, making it possible to integrate S-PLUS seamlessly with other Windows/NT applications.

ABOUT S

MathSoft's data analysis product family, which includes S-PLUS and MathSoft StatServer, is based on S, an object-oriented language developed at Lucent Technologies specifically for data visualization, exploration and programming with data. S provides a rich, object-oriented environment designed for interactive data discovery. With a huge library of functions for all aspects of computing with data, S offers unmatched power, flexibility and extensibility. The S System was recently honored with the prestigious Software Systems Award given by the Association for Computing Machinery. Other hallmark technologies recognized with this award include UNIX, TCP/IP, Tcl/Tk, INGRES, and Mosaic. MathSoft has exclusive worldwide rights to develop and distribute products incorporating the S technology.

AVAILABILITY

With a list price of $2195, S-PLUS 2000 will be available at the end of June for Windows 95/98/NT. Academic, non-profit and government prices are also available.

ABOUT MATHSOFT

Founded in 1984, MathSoft is the provider of the broadest line of technical calculation and analytical software for business and academia. With MathSoft's products, users can deploy technical calculations and exploratory data analyses across their entire organizations. The company has more than one million users of its Mathcad, StudyWorks, S-PLUS, StatServer and Axum software worldwide. Users include technical professionals worldwide at more than 90% of the Fortune 1,000 companies and over 500 government installations, and students and faculty at over 2,000 colleges and universities.

S-PLUS product information can be obtained via MathSoft's Web site located at http://www.mathsoft.com, by phone at 1-800/569-0123, by fax at 206/283-8691 or via mail at 1700 Westlake Avenue North, Suite 500, Seattle, WA 98109. MathSoft's corporate headquarters can be reached by phone at 1-800/628-4223, by fax at 617/577-8829 or via mail at 101 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142.